Now Both JSOC AND CIA Have Green Light to Target American Citizen

Let the competition begin. The WaPo clarifies an earlier Reuters report (which was unclear that this pertained to CIA) that Anwar al-Awlaki has been added to the CIA’s kill list, after having been on JSOC’s kill list for some months.

Anwar al-Aulaqi, who resides in Yemen, was previously placed on a target list maintained by the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command and has survived at least one strike carried out by Yemeni forces with U.S. assistance against a gathering of suspected al-Qaeda operatives.

Because he is a U.S. citizen, adding Aulaqi to the CIA list required special approval from the White House, officials said. The move means that Aulaqi would be considered a legitimate target not only for a military strike carried out by U.S. and Yemeni forces, but also for lethal CIA operations.

“He’s in everybody’s sights,” said the U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the topic’s sensitivity.

Does it strike you as odd that we’re targeting US citizens with no judicial process? Does it strike you as odd that we’ve got two entirely separate sets of list on which Americans can be targeted to be killed? Does it strike you as odd that we’ve now got an apparent turf battle over who gets to kill al-Awlaki?

One more bit of irony. The intelligence that won al-Awlaki a place on the kill list? It almost certainly came from Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is not an American citizen (though he was captured in the US and he is the son of a bigwig banker), about whom we fought for months over whether we ought to Mirandize him.